Jordi Plana, founder and CEO of Spenta and social spin-off Beezy, was interviewed during the WPC11 at Los Angeles, CA. The Students to Business team had the chance to have lunch with him and learn a bit more about entrepreneurship and his experience. Thank you very much Jordi.
“Screw it, let’s do it” is what Richard Branson said in his WPC11 video, just before getting to the stage. This entrepreneur is the founder and president of the Virgin Group (yeah, the airline, music, video, phone…).
“Forgive enemies, live is too short” and “It’s much better in life to be friendly with enemies” were the first advises he gave us. Taking about the business environment, he stated that India and China are growing 10%, Africa is growing 5-6%, therefore, they are countries to focus on. He thinks more people can help develop more clean energy; there is a mayor concern on global warming and becoming self efficient, good areas to develop a business.
Jon Roskill asked him who he saw for advise once the risk was taken. Richard believes you should take risks but protect the company you built up at the same time. You shouldn’t take a risk that put in risk the whole company: make sure you protect your investment and watch out with the mortage (you don’t wanna loose your house, do you?)
I was amazed when he said that a year from now he’ll be flying to the space with his kid through Virgin Galactic, his new adventure.
His real adventure is starting businesses though. When you start a business, the main challenge is to survive, when you pass the survival barrier, you have to focus on your workers, government, going global… It’s always an adventure. They use their entrepreneurial skills at Virgin to develop new businesses: they set up a new organization and whenever they are sure it can run by itself, they just let it run.
When Jon asked him who he’d like to meet, he said he’d like to meet Jesus Christ and try to make him and some other religious leaders tell the governments they didn’t mean some things the government believe. Richard thinks it would have been nice to meet Cleopatra too (hahaha).
He never though of himself as a business person, the reason he got in the music business was to keep alive the music he loved. Then he started an airline because he wanted better flights… He started those business to solve his problems and everybody’s problems. We all now how a start up should born, it needs to solve a problem.
Richard Branson, probably one of the world’s best sales person.
Jeanne C. Meister defines the future workplace in three words:
The 2020 workplace is here now, the future employee will have 10.000 hours gaming experience by the age of 21. How could we engage the future employee with the same spirit?
Three forces are shaping the 2020 workplace: demographics, social web and globalization. If we focus in the US, we can sort the employees by generations:
By the year 2020, 50% of the US workers will be part of the Millennial generation. Generational markers are very different around the world.
Jeanne pointed out that the Indiana State won’t teach handwriting anymore, they’ll use the handwriting lectures’ time to teach typing (personally, I type almost ten times more than I handwrite).
According to her studies, companies are doing social web (87% will use 2.0 tools soon, although 43% of social networking sites used are not supported by the company IT service). They are going social:
1. Social learning
5 top benefits: collaboration, p2p learning, knowledge sharing, meet development needs, productivity
5 top barriers: security, confusion on usage, culture of firm, pass along wrong data, decreased productivity
2. Using social media
How: with tools like socialmediagovernance.com
Why: like Dell, many companies create learning programs and certifications about social media so that their employees get to know what they can and can’t share
So what: on average, knowledge workers spend 25% of their time searching… Collaborating will save up most of that searching time
3. Globalizing
What are the main innovations?
Recruiting is going younger and younger, even before college. It’s also using gaming, like Facebook’s game called My Marriott (similar to Farmville), so that people can see how working at a Marriott looks like
Learning will be social and leverage an international social network. Example: uCern network. It’s a way of engaging thru corporate apps and mobile learning. Online mentoring and micro feedback are also really popular
So, what are her predictions for the 2020 workplace?
Everyone will have a reputation score including leaders – check out Klout, a company that lets you know your online influence rated between 1 and 100
Building game like incentives into non game experiences – like a toothbrush connected thru the wifi that uploads the number of times you brush your teeth, it can become a game just like Foursquare did
The 2020 Workplace book is available in Amazon for everyone to buy.
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